In the current information age, it has often been discussed that proliferation of information technology (IT) can lead to more convenience, efficiency, productivity, enjoyment, etc., in life. The extensive use and development of IT facilities in an enterprise (or other organization) environment, as well as in a home environment, has been accompanied by escalating accumulations of electronic documents and data and documents.
The current IT trend, particularly for enterprises and other organizations, is to obtain data, document and application on-demand, in an outsourcing approach known nominally as Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS is typically an IT approach wherein enterprises and users obtain access, over the Internet, to applications and related services that would otherwise have to be located in their own personal or enterprise computers.
SaaS is often a popular approach for enterprises because, instead of a major upfront investment (for example, tens of thousands to millions of dollars) to create and maintain IT infrastructure, the enterprise pays a monthly fee to access applications. In addition, such access is generally obtained, without a time-consuming in-house rollout of technology. Further, SaaS allows the enterprise to focus on its own operations, without requiring employing a full IT staff to maintain the applications.
In the current IT environment in which SaaS is the dominant approach, application, data (and document) storage and user interface are by default (that is, generally) hosted by the SaaS vendor at an off-site location. The customer can access this service via a web connection. However, such approach typically has vulnerabilities from data-thefts and slow performance, particularly when large quantities of data are being retrieved. Accordingly, many enterprises prefer to keep their electronic data and documents behind their own firewall, notwithstanding the attractiveness of the SaaS architecture.
There remains a need for an improved approach for managing electronic data and documents, to keep the documents and data on-site, allow a user to readily reference and/or obtain the electronic data and documents, and avoid a large and cumbersome software system on site for such data/document management and access.